Maggie
by MaggieTheUnicorn
Summary: I added my own character into Seedfolks. Looks and name based off me... it's a oneshot... enjoy! :


Maggie

I have lived two lives. I was born in Ireland, Maggie Fitz-Patrick in the small town of Dingle, surrounded on all four sides by rain and red hair. Then we moved. I was nine. We moved to a city, a place I'd never seen before, called Cleveland.

My sister and I were happy at first, we filled the apartment with plants and pictures, as if those small things could make us feel like we were at home again. My parents would take us in their arms and hold us tight until we fell asleep and dreamed of our small farm back home. They would chatter to us in our native tongue, a form of Gaelic that was heavily accented and left a large handprint in the way we spoke English.

We learned their language, their slang, how we should act and dress. And, with time, we even made friends. Shane, my sister, was quite a popular child. At the tender age of eight years old, she had the whole world at her whim, winning the hearts of every kid in our school with her pencil straight red hair and face full of gorgeous freckles. She instantly attached to a handsome Italian boy Tony who lived a block away from us, her right hand man, as she called him. I was shy, nothing new to the kids at our school, with my curly brown hair and average face, and looks won't make you friends if you're not willing to make friends, so I just spent my time with Shane and Tony, and I was perfect with that. I had home here in my family and new adventures to come. We were happy in our little piece of Ireland.

And then it was gone. Slipped right through my fingers and dripped away, like blood on a concrete floor, a sight I was so unfortunately familiar with.

School let out one afternoon and I chased my sister through the streets, laughing and giggling all the way. She rounded a corner and I expected to hear her scream, "Maggie! Come find me!". I waited on the other side of the corner, to jump out at her and scare her, but I heard no call. It was silent; her usually happy voice was nowhere to be heard.

I rounded the corner and found her standing still, motionless, staring at two bodies I instantly recognized. Our parents. She let out a shrill scream, one that tore my heart out of my chest and threw it onto the ground with my parents, and she fell to her knees. A man with a bloody knife was running from the scene.

I pulled her into my arms and held her tight as she screamed, ignoring the stabbing pain in my stomach and my ears. Her small hands pulled on her long red hair, her freckled face was contorted with the pain that we both felt. I could only weep as she continued to screech.

She never spoke again. From that moment onward, her voice seemed to be lost. I spoke for her, we had grown a strong bond since our parents' deaths. She had become a freak of nature to her many fans; the girl they'd fallen in love with, the one who would laugh and joke and tug her sister around like she was queen of the world, was gone, replaced by a zombie who wouldn't talk. Only Tony stuck by her side, because he'd lost his mother when he was young. With his help, we got over the initial shock, but the aftermath was no better. We were given three days to pack our things and we were off to a foster home on Gibb street.

For two years she stared out her bedroom window, silent, as always, peering into the distance, as if she could see all the way to heaven if she tried. She looked like a thirteen year old, was as intelligent as a twenty year old, but acted as if she was three. Silent, alone, scared.

"Maggie, Shane, breakfast is ready!" is the call we hear every morning, ringing up the stairs of the house we live in. Shane pulls her raggedy blue sweater over her top, like she does every morning, and walks downstairs with me. She eats, brushes her teeth, and waits for me by the door. She can't do anything by herself, she tells me she's scared, not with her voice of course. With her eyes. As soon as I join her by her side, she relaxes. As soon as I leave her side, she's afraid of everyone.

Every night I curled up in bed and lay awake until I was sure Shane was asleep. Once I could hear her short, even breaths, I cried, letting out the stress from the days before. I couldn't let Shane see me like this, I had to remain her rock to stand on, so I got out my emotions when she couldn't hear me. And every morning, I would wake up strong. And act like nothing could hurt me, and when the night came, I would cry. Cry for hours until I fell asleep and dreamed of nothing, like I always do. It had become routine for me.

Shortly after her thirteenth birthday, I found Shane gazing out her window, a familiar sight, but what she was gazing at wasn't. Below and across the street was the maybe half acre vacant lot that had always been there, filled to the point of bursting with trash bags and old junk. Now, as we gazed down at the lot, we were seeing men from the city clearing it out. As they hauled trash bags and old sofas out of the lot and on to a truck, a proud looking black woman observed from the sidewalk, seeming quite content with herself.

A week later came the people. A Vietnamese girl I recognized from the Elementary school was pouring water over her little green dots in the ground. In the opposite corner, a Puerto Rican kid was planting seeds from a bag I could just about tell said _Pumpkin _across the front. In a plot by the sidewalk, the same black woman who had been watching the lot get cleared was banging a sign into the ground that said _Goldenrod _across it in yellow letters.

It only took a month or so before the garden was just as diverse in people as it was in plants. A muscley black man was planting tomatoes in a garden signposted _Lateesha's Tomatoes. _An English woman and her friend in a wheelchair were planting little yellow flowers in a barrel. A Korean woman's peppers sat next to an Indian man's eggplant which sat next to pregnant Mexican girl's Swiss chard. All it took was a few months, and the vacant lot became a place brimming with color and diversity.

One morning in July, maybe, Shane looked up at me when she realized I was behind her. I was about an inch taller than her, being a year older, and had the same piercing blue eyes she once had. Our eyes would identical if it weren't for the heavy glaze that was settled across the top of hers, forming a sort of barrier between her and the real world.

But as she gazed at the garden, there was a spark in her eyes that I hadn't seen since we moved from Ireland. She was looking at the garden and seeing her own rolling green fields, beautiful flowers and tall trees that would recreate our little piece of Ireland again.

As she looked at me, I knew what I had to do. I went to Miss Angelina, the owner of the foster home and asked if Shane and I could have a spot in that community garden.

Miss Angelina went out right away and bought us a trowel, a watering can and some seeds, after doing some research on what kinds of plants grew in Dingle. She gave Shane the supplies and my baby sister was off to work within minutes.

Over the next few months, the heat became excruciating, but Shane would not stop. She tilled the land and molded it into small, rolling hills, like the ones back home. She planted grass and cotton, that, from our bedroom window, looked like sheep grazing in luscious fields. She planted walls of tall roses around the outsides of the garden, encasing it in a fence of beauty.

With some help from Tony, and some extra wire from his basement, the two of them made an arch and pounded it into the ground, making an entrance into the encased garden. Shane managed to get some ivy to creep up the sides, creating a gorgeous archway into her garden. With some finishing touches: some fairy lights over the arch, a small bonsai tree given to her by a Chinese man in the next plot over, and a sign that said _IRELAND _in big green letters, Shane's garden was finished.

I would look down at her working in the garden sometimes for hours, smiling to myself as she stroked the petals of her favorite rose, a fairy pink one by the entrance that was our mother's favorite color. Sometimes, I would look down and see Tony with her, chattering away, not afraid to admit that he, the tough, muscley Italian boy, was a sucker for roses.

Somewhere around mid-August, I was peering down out of our window, watching Shane work among the other people in the garden, when I saw something I hadn't seen since the death of our parents nearly three years ago. Shane was crouched down over one of her flowers, stroking the pink petals softly, when her lips began to move.

I ran out of the house and across the street, to the garden, and stood in the doorway of our plot of land. And sure enough, Shane was whispering to her plants.

"Thank you," I heard her soft voice say as she stroked the petals gently. "Thank you." I gasped and she looked up, her face blushing a deep shade of red. She let go of the flower and looked at me, as if expecting something.

I turned around and took off down the street, running towards the Italian part of the village and straight to the house I knew belonged to Tony. I knocked on the door with the secret knock Shane had taught me would bring Tony to the door within seconds, and sure enough, the door swung open to reveal an excited looking Tony behind it.

He looked almost disappointed when he saw it was me on his doorstep rather than Shane. "Um, hey Mags, what's up?" he asked, confused.

"Shane… she's speaking…" I panted. That was all it took to get him to slam the door behind him and take off towards the garden at a speed that would put any Italian racecar to shame.

I ran after him, joining him in Shane's garden. She looked up at us and said the same word, quietly, in her scratchy, underused voice, "Thank you," she whispered. "Thank you."

Tony and I wrapped her un a tight, simultaneous hug as she struggled to breathe beneath our weight. When we were finished hugging her, she stomped on Tony's foot, gaining a lot of shouts and swears from him.

I turned to go back to the foster home, to tell Miss Angelina of Shane's words. I'd have my whole life to be with Shane, she wasn't going anywhere, so I thought I'd give her some time alone with Tony. When I reached the door of the foster home, I looked back just in time to see Tony give Shane a small kiss on the forehead as they sat, talking to each other in the garden. Smiling to myself, I went inside.

Life from then on got increasingly better. Shane's familiar voice slowly came back, losing its raspy tone for good and taking back on the harsh, guttural, accented sound I had missed so much. Over time, the wall that separated her from the world came crashing down, revealing the confident, hilarious girl with the flaming red hair and the world wrapped around her pinky finger.

Her electric blue eyes were restored shortly after as well, filling themselves to the brim with her happiness. Not once did she look back in anger, not once did she look back and regret that she had spent three years of her adolescence in a vow of solitary silence. She looked back with pride, not at the pathetic years spent alone and depressed, but at the recovery made even though it seemed the whole world doubted her.

Life got increasingly better after that summer, even when the garden became a sea of leaves, and soon, an unrecognizable square of dirt. Shane grew like other teenagers, fitting back into the crowd as if the last three years had never happened.

But we both know they had, and we often talked about it. It wasn't an open cut any more, no, it was a scar. You can pretend that scars aren't there, but when you look in the mirror, you see them. To me, Shane was like a mirror. We were different, but we had suffered through the worst. We couldn't ignore the past because we could see it in each other. It was with each other's help that we learned. And with each other's help, we grew.

And with her help, my third life began. All because of a little patch of home.

...

**AN: My first fanfic ever… I wrote it for a school project originally, but it came out so well I decided to post it! Maggie's based off of me… but not based off of me at the same time… thanks to my amazing beta Shane… love her! (yes, she's the shane in the story as well)… nothing that happened to Maggie and Shane is real… I just love her and put her into a story… i'm babbling! Sorry!**

**3 Maggie :P**


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